John allowed himself the luxury of time. His fingertips lingered over the mole above her waist on her right side and briefly feathered along the silvery stretch marks on her abdomen. He explored the solid flesh of her thighs and paused at the back of her knees, and he turned her over so he could etch the faint blue tracery of veins there with gentle fingers. When he reached the long scar below her knee, its hard surface white against her tan, he looked at her questioningly, but she only smiled a faint sad smile and in a burst of desire captured his lips fiercely with her own.
Her pleasure in their mating was intense. His body engulfed her, quickened her with feeling, loosed her and warmed her. It did not even matter that he reached his peak and she didn't; her delight in his body was enough.
Afterward, ardor spent, they lay side by side on their backs, inhaling the heady scent of crushed lavender and watching puffs of clouds in the sky. Their skin shimmered in the sunshine, dewy and moist.
John lifted her hand and traced the curving line across the width of her palm as though it were a map of her previous life. "What were you like back then, before the accident?" He glanced up at her.
She smiled, looking back at herself from the perspective of space and years.
"I was fluffy," she said, remembering her round face, devoid of planes, bare of experience.
"What do you mean, 'fluffy'?" He turned his head slowly and looked at her, amused.
"You know. Fluffy. Frothy. Unserious. About as much substance as that cloud up there. For me life was just a bowl of cherries. Until all I had left was the pits." Her eyes hardened momentarily, then became soft again.
More silence while he digested this. "You're not still frightened of me, are you?" he asked, his hand now toying idly with a lock of her hair.
"No," she said, "but I—" Here she stopped.
"You what?" he said, his eyes keen upon her face.
"I'm afraid you're disappointed," she whispered.
He raised himself on one elbow and stared at her.
"No way," he said fiercely. "I want everything to be all right between us because of you, not me. You have to understand that right now, Cassandra."
The fervor in his words not only startled her, it also convinced her. She felt something akin to awe at the intensity of his feelings. "Maybe you're expecting too much, John. I don't think I'm capable of—"
"Cassie, you've had a lot to deal with. Be patient with yourself."
"That's what I'm doing, but when I don't make progress on your timetable, that's my problem, not yours."
"Listen to what you're saying, Cassie!" He had an agenda, but no schedule. He would have been glad to discuss the subject, but not if she was going to go all negative.
His outburst surprised her. "Forget I said anything," she said. Her expression became aloof as she sat upright. She pulled her shift over her head and adjusted the fabric, refusing to meet his gaze.
John kept his voice calm. "You don't think you deserve kindness, or happiness, or pleasure. You're tearing yourself apart with unworthiness, Cassie Muldoon, and for no reason." He began to pull on his jeans.
"What do you know about it?" She stumbled to her feet. Who was he to tell her how she should feel? She'd been imprisoned in places John Howard had never known, dark caverns of the heart and of the mind, places you didn't dance away from but fought your way out of bit by bit, heartache by heartache, until you were bleeding and battered and had no taste for life. John knew nothing of struggle. Oh, she could tell John Howard a thing or two.
"I don't know nearly enough," he said. He took her hand and led her to a sheltering maple. She didn't resist when he pulled her down next to him in the dappled sunlight.
They sat for a time in the quiet, and then her words tumbled out before she could stop them. "I killed them. I killed Kevin and Rory. I didn't hold a gun to their heads or stab them with a knife, but I might as well have. I loved them, and I killed them, my husband and my son, and how does a person live with that?" Tears began to run down her cheeks, and she brushed them away.
John hesitated only a moment before drawing Cassie into his arms. He listened to her heart beating, felt her breath against his throat.
"I remember the stories on the news when it happened," he said against her hair. "The three of you were flying home to your place in the desert, and the plane crashed when you attempted an emergency landing. Your husband and son were killed, and you survived. Cassie, you didn't kill them. The crash did."
She lifted her head, and her face was ashen, her expression lifeless, her lips taut and bloodless. Her eyes were silver mirrors that reflected all the tragedy in the world. "That story is the one that was released, but it wasn't the whole truth. My agent wanted to protect me."
"Do you want to tell me what really happened?" he said gently.
Her voice was barely more than a whisper. "Kevin passed out as we were flying, he fell forward and I couldn't wake him up. Rory started to cry, and I couldn't think what to do. So I turned to the emergency frequency on the radio—Kevin had made sure I knew which frequency it was—and tried to contact a control tower, another plane, anybody...." Her voice trailed off, her eyes glazing in remembrance of the horror of it.
John's arms tightened around her. "Cassie, you don't have to talk about it if you don't want to." His heart ached for her.
She swallowed, drew a deep breath and went on.
"Finally a voice came over the radio, and he said he was a pilot and he'd talk me down out of the sky. I knew a bit about flying from watching Kevin and what he'd taught me, but I'd never taken the pinch-hitter's course. That's a brief course of instruction that helps non-pilots learn to handle a plane if there's an emergency. Kevin always wanted me to take that course, but I never had time. There was always a rehearsal or a concert date or some reason why I couldn't." Her sobs ripped through his heart.
"You never dreamed anything like that would happen to you," he said quietly, kissing away the tears.
Cassie sat up straighter and visibly tried to calm herself. "I guess I didn't. Who does?" With an effort she pulled herself together enough to go on.
"The pilot on the radio was on the ground at a small private airport less than five miles away, and so I followed his instructions until I saw the runway. They'd turned on the lights, making it easy for me to find it. And I did everything he said, everything, and Kevin was still unconscious and Rory was in the back seat holding his breath and I was hanging on for dear life thinking I had it made. About ten feet above the ground, I lost control of the plane. We hit so hard that the plane flipped over and Kevin was thrown out on impact, still buckled into his seat, and Rory was, too, and they died, they died! And it wasn't fair, I should have died, too. But I didn't. I wasn't thrown from the plane and I lived."
"You were hurt seriously, as I recall," said John, shaken by her narrative and the agony with which it was told.
"I had bruises and cuts and a compound fracture of the tibia. I was in the hospital a long time, but not long enough. I was afraid to get out and face things again. Fortunately, I didn't have to at first."
"What did you do?"
"I went to stay with Morgana Friday. It was during the time after the accident, when I stayed with Morgana in her Century City apartment, that I gave her permission to use a song I'd recorded but never released. She was directing All the Way Home, which she described as a really terrific documentary, trying to get me interested in something, anything. That's why my song became so famous. It would never have been a hit without Morgana." She closed her eyes and rested her head against John's broad shoulder, taking comfort from his sympathy.
John had Morgana to thank, too. She was the one who had finally given him Cassie's address. But Morgana had been maddeningly evasive, protecting her friend's privacy at all costs. John hadn't had an inkling that Cassie Muldoon was the lost entertainer Cassandra Dare.
She was tough, Morgana was. It had taken him months to convince her to tell him where he could find Mrs. K. J. Muldoon. He'd
never once connected the Muldoons with the disappearance of Cassandra Dare. He'd learned only that the Muldoons had an accident and that Cassie's generosity was his salvation. John became obsessed with finding her and thanking her. He'd been so depressed over losing his sight that his life might as well have been over before the transplant of Kevin's corneas.
Now that he'd found Cassie and knew who she really was, and now that he knew that the saving of his sight was due to the generosity of this woman whose husband was also a pilot, it all seemed to make sense, as though destiny had brought them together.
Cassie was talking, and he forced himself to listen. "Ours was a good marriage, one of the few I know of," Cassie was saying softly. "We met when I'd been in California barely a year, and he understood show business because he'd been around it all his life. He became my manager, and if it hadn't been for him, I wouldn't have been a success. After all, who wanted to hire a girl who sang folk songs and played a mountain dulcimer? Kevin knew the people to see and how to gain access. He protected me from the harsher realities of the business. We showed people that I could sing other kinds of songs, too, and, well, you know the rest."
"Only the public part," John said. "Pictures of you in the tabloids, in the newspapers. Public relations articles. You kept a pretty low profile."
"Kevin and I decided early in the game that we didn't want to be part of the glitter and glamour of Hollywood. We did the things we had to do to advance my career, and the rest of the time we spent as a family, hidden away at our place in the desert. We had such a wonderful life. I don't know why it had to end."
John took in her large, mournful eyes, her slightly parted lips, the unusual and beautiful face he loved. The face Kevin had loved, and which he, because Kevin had died, and because his own corneas had been irreparably scarred, saw now quite literally through Kevin's eyes.
Chapter 7
John had been in love three times and in "like"—for want of a better term—more times than he could count. Each romance was different.
There was that first memorable college affair—stormy, chaotic and filled with anguish over whether or not marriage would be the end result. It wasn't. John had never been so perplexed in his life.
His second love, who embodied every quality he'd ever desired in a woman, dropped out of his life without warning when their relationship was at its peak. "I'd rather leave while I'm in love," she explained. John had never been so depressed in his life.
Soon he'd met Charlene. Moneyed and mad about him, she talked him out of his depression and into marriage within six weeks of their meeting. John had never been so happy in his life.
Then he found out that, like Robert Browning's "My Last Duchess,"
...she liked whate'er
She looked on, and her looks went everywhere.
When Charlene's looks, not to mention certain parts of her anatomy, lingered too long on her karate instructor, John walked out. The divorce had been neat and uncomplicated, but he hadn't been in love since, a circumstance that John considered a blessing.
That left being in "like."
He pursued starlets trying to make it in a no-go world, receptionists who'd figured out that the best way to become upwardly mobile was to marry a man like him, and a corporation type who spent a lot of time speculating what would happen to their relationship when she was transferred to Houston.
He'd been invited to coke parties and driven himself home early and alone; to dinner with business contacts who dumped their voluptuous daughters on him; and on a memorable trip to Hawaii with a woman who in midair developed a crush on the male flight attendant and moved into the guy's hotel room in Waikiki, leaving John to hang out morosely in the hotel bar and debate the true meaning of life with a sympathetic bartender.
John's last girlfriend had lived in an apartment tented with bargain batiks, booby-trapped with low-slung fretted tables, and dominated by a huge brass coffeepot in which no coffee ever perked. There had been spears and gourds and other oddities too ominous to mention, many of them situated in uncomfortable places. A wild boar's head, stuffed, fixed any occupant of the king-sized waterbed with a baleful eye, not to mention a well-honed tusk when one got up to go to the bathroom in the dark. John had eased out of the relationship, just short, he was convinced, of being paralyzed by a poison dart and being mounted like the trophy he was.
Which was right before a Mack truck mowed into him on the freeway. His head bashed through the windshield and the glass ground into his eyes, injuring his corneas, the transparent rounded surface that accounts for the eye's focusing power. John's vision was scarred, but he would regain it, according to the doctors, if he would undergo corneal transplants. John agreed, but they'd have to wait for a donor.
John spent the months after the accident lost in denial. He couldn't accept what had happened to him, and his rage over his fate corroded him from the inside out. He'd hated the world and everything in it. If the corneal transplant wasn't successful, he ran the risk of losing what was left of his sight. The realization that perhaps he'd never fly again hit him hard. Some days he drank too much, others he wanted to die. Finally his doctor called with the good news that a donor had been found.
John's benefactor was one K. J. Muldoon, killed in an unspecified accident. His wife had signed the permission papers that allowed Mr. Muldoon's corneas to be used. Within weeks after the operation, John, his eyes made new by another's generosity, could see again. He'd learned the name of the donor from a disgruntled nurse who had been fired and had no respect for HIPAA privacy laws. She passed along forbidden hospital records for the price of a cup of coffee at Starbucks.
John knew he had to speak with Mrs. K. J. Muldoon to convey his heartfelt gratitude. He'd written to her Palm Springs address, but his letters had never been answered. He'd dispatched more letters, and they'd been marked "Return to Sender." Frustrated, desperate, knowing he could not rest until he thanked her, he'd driven to her home in his BMW.
He'd arrived at the big walled retreat outside Palm Springs, immediately noticing the small hangar at the back of the estate. If he'd known there was a runway, he probably would have flown one of his planes instead of driving. He hadn't been able to raise a soul at the house, even though he pushed his way in through an open back gate and pounded on several doors and shouted until he was hoarse. A curious gardener had finally peered around the corner of the house, convinced that he was confronting a madman.
A fifty-dollar bill convinced the gardener to tell the madman where he sent the monthly invoice for his services, and John had driven away with a Century City address in his pocket.
The address had led him to Morgana, eventually, and finally to Cassie.
John was a tenacious man. He had, after all, inherited along with his father's shipping business a small cargo airline that was about to go bankrupt. He'd built it into a multifaceted organization serving cities on the West Coast and Hawaii. He was the kind who perceived a problem, defined the solution, and hung on until the solution was reached. Even so, the self-appointed task of finding Mrs. K. J. Muldoon was more than he bargained for.
When she turned out to be Cassie, a real-life person who touched his heart and his mind and his body in a way no one else ever had, he fell in love with her. He intended to bring her down off the mountain no matter what it took. There was no going back.
He didn't fool himself. From the get-go, he knew that it wouldn't be easy. But he never dreamed that it would turn out to be so difficult.
Chapter 8
Cassie and John rested in a green-shadowed glade beside a wide stream. Here and there, the racing water of the creek foamed into swirling knots around low brown rocks. Cassie leaned back against a poplar trunk and raised her face to a shaft of sunlight. So warm it felt, so peaceful. She felt peaceful. She savored the feeling, keenly aware of John's presence as he lay beside her.
Lambent light highlighted his rugged features and picked out the warm blue depths of his eyes, half closed and lazy now. His hand
, firm and sure, reached out to interlace with hers on the leaf-strewn ground between them.
After several weeks together, Cassie was aware of all the configurations of him, convex, concave, as though she'd sculpted him with her own hands. She knew the texture of his hair threading through her fingers, the downy sweetness of his earlobes, the honeyed wetness of his mouth. She knew the flat satiny skin of his abdomen, the coarse softness of the hair below and the carven perfection of what it sheltered, knew how to make him bloom at her very touch. She knew John Howard.
"Sleepy?" he asked, rolling on his side, his voice rich and low and tender.
Cassie shook her head. "Somehow a walk in the mountains always invigorates me."
"I feel that way early in the morning when I run. But now I feel dozy, relaxed." He squeezed her hand.
"Flatlander," she accused affectionately. "Everybody knows you folks take time to adjust to the altitude."
"I'm feeling pretty high all right," he agreed with a teasing look. "High on you."
She laughed, used to his joshing. She had forgotten how good it could be to have someone to laugh with. That morning they'd hiked to Gran's old ginseng patch in the woods. Cassie only harvested in the fall, but she liked to check on the plants occasionally during the summer. It pleased her that John had asked to accompany her. They'd taken a picnic lunch, and on their way home they'd stopped beside the creek.
"When will you finish your work here?" Cassie asked.
"In September."
She averted her eyes. During the past weeks John had settled comfortably into a special place in her heart. She wished they didn't have to say good-bye so soon.
"I'd like you to come with me when I go," he said quietly.
She stared at him. "I've already told you I'll never leave this mountain."
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